Akira takes a little trip to the seaside

They arrived at the underground headquarters to find a compound already taking shape. In spite of the bleak setting, there was a certain undeniable excitement in the air.

Everyone kept telling them that they weren't down in the 24th ward proper—that realm was much deeper and less accessible. This place was some forgotten subbasement, or maybe several connected subbasements and underground utility passageways. It had been shut off from the above world by new construction, earthquakes, and general disrepair. It was dank and decrepit, but there was ventilation and even plumbing and electricity in several areas. It was more than enough.

Akira, Touka, and Kaneki had all independently had the idea to slowly empty their bank accounts and sock away the money in more untraceable forms. They had a decent war chest to work with.

With those funds, the less recognizable ghouls were able sneak back to the surface and keep their hideout supplied.

Yoriko had already managed to set up a simple kitchen with camp kitchen equipment from a hiking supply store procured on one such trip. She'd even commandeered one of the Squad Zero kids as her assistant, and was occupying herself with feeding the humans in the area.

Amon went off to try and figure out where their bags—and Maris Stella—had ended up.

Akira headed to the makeshift kitchen, needing some water and carbs to help balance out the beers she'd downed.

She sat cross-legged on a flattish piece of broken concrete, in front of the table—a sheet of plywood balanced on a several pallets. Yoriko quickly set a steaming bowl in front of her.

"It's just store-bought ramen, but I threw in some chilis and garlic to give it a little pizazz."

The blonde took a bite. "It's delicious. No one expects a Michelin-star meal from you, you're already doing more than enough."

Yoriko moved to the other side of the makeshift table and uncovered a ball of dough that had been resting under a damp towel. She punched it a few times and then began aggressively kneading it on a cheap plastic cutting board. "I saw the way Touka fought off the investigators under Cochlea. It was terrifying—to see my friend looking like that, and to be in danger like that—I still don't understand half of what I've gotten myself into, but I know I can't be like Touka. And I'm not an investigator like you. I cook, I bake, it's the only thing I can do to help. And no one here even eats my food!"

After another bite of her dinner, Akira spoke again. "You're helping, don't worry."

Yoriko threw the dough back on the table and covered it again. "Alright. I'm ready. Tell me if you saw him."

As she worked on eating her food, Akira recounted her run-in with Takeomi for the baker—withholding the fact that he'd bought a ring. It didn't seem right to reveal that. She did tell Yoriko to write him a letter, and Akira would ensure that it got where it needed to go.

Near the end of the debrief, Touka wandered into the kitchen. As usual, she was carting Ichika. "Hey. Everything okay?"

"Yes. Ito has been successfully reintroduced to the wild. How's your task going?"

Touka pulled her phone out and waved it. "There's no signal this far underground, I'll have to get closer to the surface to see if there's any more messages. But before we went under, she agreed to a meeting."

"Excellent. Where?"

Touka hesitated. "I was trying to think of somewhere good to meet, where no one would suspect us of going…"

"A good start," drawled Akira. "Where were you thinking of?"

"Well, I want a place where you can disappear into a crowd, and little or no high-tech surveillance. It doesn't hurt if it's a place no one would ever expect a ghoul, so probably somewhere full of smelly food…"

Again, Akira had the thought that Touka was smart in useful ways. If things had gone very differently—and with the right training—she could be a force of nature.

Yoriko gasped. "Ooh, I know! A fish market! That'd be perfect, right?"

Which was how Akira and Touka ended up standing in front of a fishmonger's stall, buying up the various items on the grocery list Yoriko had sent with them.

Akira took the wrapped cut of tuna and put it in her bag. "I'll admit, this is a lot better than any silly middle-of-the-night spy movie rendezvous."

Adjusting the bucket hat she was wearing both to blend in and hide her face from any overhead cameras, she looked around the off-the-beaten-path local fish market Yoriko had recommended. Outdoors, full of people, mundane and low-tech enough that they were lucky to have working electricity in the vendor's stalls.

Touka was having a more difficult time with the very strong seafood smell. "Good job, Yoriko," she choked out.

"How are you doing?"

"I'm regretting everything." The ghoul looked faintly green. She checked her phone. "She says she's at an outdoor table by a takoyaki stand."

It took a couple of minutes of walking up and down the wharf, but they spotted the lone woman sitting at a small table.

Akira was a little surprised at how…normal Kimi looked. The young woman was pretty, but in an everyday way. She'd thought Kimi must be incredibly beautiful for Nishiki to always be talking about her with such reverence, because she assumed the ghoul must be shallow like that.

Nishiki simply rubbed her the wrong way, even though objectively she ought to appreciate a young man who was good with children and loved smart women. Maybe he just had one of those faces that set off her douchebag alarms.

From the nearby food stalls, Akira grabbed a couple of servings of takoyaki and some boba for herself so they could blend in better. And because she hadn't stopped to grab breakfast on the way out of the 24th ward that morning.

As she sat down to eat, the trio eyed each other cautiously.

"Hey, Touka, it's been a long time."

"It sure has." Touka made quick introductions. "Kimi, this is Akira. Akira, Kimi."

The young woman spoke tersely, eyes darting around. "Why did you need to see me?"

Touka spoke in a low, serious voice. "We need your help. There's no one else we can trust with this. There's a half-ghoul who desperately needs your attention."

Akira nearly choked on her boba. It was tough to keep a straight face at that brazen lie.

Kimi was taken aback. She glanced around again. Akira didn't blame her. It was unnerving being out in public as a wanted fugitive, even wearing shapeless clothes and a hat that hid her face. Though, between the hot food, crisp air, and sun, it was still a lovely day.

Touka reached across the table to put her hand on Kimi's wrist. "Please. It's my daughter. We can't trust a human doctor, and ghoul doctors are practically nonexistent…you're the only person I could think of."

"Your daughter?" Kimi stared at her, shocked. "Wow, it really has been a long time. What's wrong?"

"This isn't the sort of conversation we should be having in public," Akira interjected. "You know enough to know if you want to help or not, we can give you details later where it's safe."

"Okay. Okay," she said, sounding more and more sure. "But you know I'm more of a research doctor than a medical doctor, right? And I left to work for Kano before I got a degree, so technically I'm not even a doctor."

"You're all we've got," Touka said truthfully.

Kimi ate a bite of her food and replied after a bit of thought. "I went to Kano to help you guys, after all. His lab's destroyed, he's just got us compiling data in some rented office space. I'm going cross-eyed running ANOVAs."

"Will you have trouble getting away?"

"No," she said with a frown. "We're searched when leaving the premises to make sure we aren't trying to smuggle any data out, but that's it."

"How fast can you get away?" Touka was slowly scooting farther and farther away from the table, eying the food suspiciously.

"I just need a day or two to tie up loose ends." Kimi thought. "Last month another researcher left for a week to be in his brother's wedding. Kano complained about it slowing work down, but he's not holding us hostage. It's not like he really cares about any of us, provided we've proven ourselves committed to the work. I don't think he sees us as anything more than tools, anyways."

Touka sighed in relief. "That's good. I expected this to be a lot trickier."

"No…There's nothing going on right now. It's strange. Like…all of a sudden, he lost interest in the benchwork he had me doing. Sometimes he disappears for days at a time when he used to be very involved in everything we did. He carries around this external hard drive—I see him take it out of his pocket and look at it ten times a day—and he just stares at his phone like he's waiting for a call."

Akira considered that information. "He's always got a next step ready…He had the hospital lined up before he left the CCG, when he got burned at the hospital he went to Aogiri, and when Aogiri was falling he had Clowns helping him escape…I doubt we've seen the last of him."

Kimi nodded. "I think you're right. He's always been careful to keep any one of us from knowing too much about the big picture, but he has some plan he's been building towards for a long time." She aimlessly moved her food around for a moment, lost in a moment of introspection.

"Nishiki is with us, you know," said Touka. "He still wears that bracelet you gave him."

Kimi looked down at her wrist, where an understated brown bracelet was fastened. "He does?"

Touka nodded.

Now that they had Kimi on their side, the clock was counting down. She had one more idea before she completely exhausted what little social capital she had left with her former colleagues.

Akira had a deep-seated distaste for spy games. She had no natural aptitude for them, but she was reasonably smart. And as with all things she applied herself to, she found that the more she practiced the better she became.

Thanks to Chie Hori—who was, frankly, an incredible resource that no one was utilizing properly—she'd installed some spyware on Kuramoto Ito's phone before letting him go. All it took was using his remaining thumb to unlock the phone while the recuperating investigator was delirious with fever.

She only checked on her backdoor into his phone when she was near the surface, which meant limited surveillance. That was the one big hindrance—the other was the fact that unless they wanted to alert Ito to their presence, she needed to stick to passively viewing what he was looking at onscreen.

Ito wasn't in Furuta's inner circle, so there were no juicy tidbits on that front, but Akira could witness the increasingly heavy-handed propaganda in his work emails, along with the fact that he'd appeared to keep quiet about her. A good sign.

And she could, with a little more help from Chie Hori, spoof his number from one of their burner phones and send Takeomi a text asking to meet in a less-than-savory bowling alley.

Akira bowled a couple of frames and sat down to sip on her soda.

Someone sat near her.

"You're a devious woman," Takeomi sighed. "The wig and glasses are a nice touch."

"I wanted to meet you without any set-up." She passed him an envelope. "Here's a letter from Yoriko."

He stared at the paper in his hands. "Furuta approached me. He hinted that he had opportunities for me to avenge Yoriko, if I wanted."

"So he thinks you think she's dead, and it's the ghouls' fault," Akira pondered.

"Yes. If I wasn't in contact with you, I would have believed what he was saying without question. Instead, it felt like…he was feeling me out for any way to exploit me. Poking at a sensitive issue and telling me what he thought I'd want to hear." He still looked too pale, too tired.

He wasn't sleeping well.

None of them were.

"I still don't trust you, Akira. You're telling me a lot of stuff I want to hear, too."

"That's fine. I don't need you to trust me. Just, whatever you do, don't trust him. And keep stoking that distrust in everyone around you, if you can get away with it."

"I dislike dishonesty."

"All warfare is deception, Takeomi." She took a manilla envelope out of her backpack and passed it over to him. It was full of papers. "You can do this for me, or burn it for all I care. But it'll help if you just leave some of these in the copier trays at the main office for someone else to find."

He turned the envelope over before opening it and peeking in. "What is this?"

"A document, one too dry and internal to the CCG to be included in that big leak from a few weeks ago. It's nothing too interesting, just payroll records. Notice the difference in salaries between investigators connected to the Washu clan and the rest of us?"

"That's not pleasant news, but it's not exactly surprising."

"Then take a closer look at those pay stubs. Notice the company that handles death benefits for all investigators? I'll tell you that I already did some digging. They're owned by the Washus under a shell corporation."

That silenced the investigator as he thought. "What does that mean?"

"I'm starting to have a few suspicions, but at the very least it means they directly benefitted from our high rate of death in the field. If you help make that known, you're just telling the truth. No dishonesty involved."

He flipped through the papers, considering her words.

Akira stood and took bowled several more frames, to give Takeomi time to digest everything. Unhappy with her mediocre score, she sat back next to him.

"How are the Quinx doing? Have you seen any of them lately?"

Takeomi looked like that was the last question in the world he wanted to answer. "Yes. I visited the Chateau a few days ago. Urie barely talked to anyone. Mutsuki said hi, then disappeared into the training room…Hsiao and Higemaru haven't been very affected themselves, but I can tell the mood at the Chateau is getting to them. Aura's still angry about what happened to his aunt." He looked up at the ceiling, a pained expression on his face. "And Yonebayashi told me…she wishes she could get hit by a bus and be isekai'd through death already."

"Yep, that sounds about right," mumbled Akira sadly. "But…where do they stand on Furuta?"

He thought for a moment on how to respond. "It's nerve-wracking when you suspect everyone around you might report you for voicing the wrong thoughts. No one wants to say anything outright, but I suspect a lot of people are thinking things the new chairman wouldn't approve of." Stuffing the papers back in the envelope, he added, "And it won't help when these start showing up around the main office."

She tried to contain her excitement, that she might have managed to undermine Furuta from within in some small way. "Be careful, don't let anyone see you leaving those."

"I won't." Takeomi's shoulders drooped. "I appreciate the letter from Yoriko, but you probably shouldn't try anything like this again. It will make her a bigger target."

And it will get Takeomi arrested or worse, Akira filled in. "Understood. Just know, whatever happens, I'm committed to keeping her safe. That means you've got to stay alive up here, too."

She couldn't, after all, drop any hints about the plan that was primed and ready to kick off any day now.

Whatever Takeomi and the rest thought of her now, her reputation was about to take an even bigger nosedive.

At least she'd managed to pull off this last meeting and gain a bit of closure.

Two days later, Touka and Akira again met Kimi in an unassuming subway station near the end of its line. After checking that they were alone, they quietly slipped away through a service door to begin heading down into the subterranean world.

Before they got very far, Akira halted their group and insisted on checking over Kimi's bags and patting her down, checking in her pockets and under her collar for any trackers or other suspicious objects. "Sorry for the invasion of privacy, but I don't want to take any chances."

Kimi nodded. "I understand."

"If you could remain quiet about Nagachika by the way, I'd appreciate it. I think he's in a precarious position and the less we talk about him, the better."

"I know," said the researcher. "That was one of his conditions, too."

They began walking down in the direction of their encampment. Touka was in front, leading the way with a flashlight as they took turn after turn into increasingly claustrophobic corridors.

The former investigator glanced over at Kimi and looked her up and down. She still felt some healthy suspicion. "This all came together too easily. We kept hearing that you wanted to stay with Kano until the end…is this really all it takes to get you to leave?"

"There's this thing in research…compassion fatigue," said Kimi after a short pause. "After you cut the heads off of nine hundred ninety-nine screaming rats, it's really hard to feel anything when you're decapitating rat one thousand. And it's easy to get so focused in on your work from a practical point of view that you forget to question whether you should be doing it from an ethical point of view."

Akira nodded. "I might understand more than you realize."

"If I think too much about what Kano is doing, at how I'm helping, I don't like who I'm becoming," said Kimi as she stared down at her feet. "I always had this thought…Nishiki didn't choose to be born a ghoul, but he has to do terrible things just to survive. I thought I could put my own conscience on the line, if it meant helping him in the end…but it's been harder to live with that than I thought. I'm burnt out, I just need someone to give me an off ramp. And you are."

"Okay, I'll buy that."

Kimi nodded and hoisted her backpack up. "I wouldn't do anything to hurt Nishiki…you don't know me, but you can trust me."

I don't trust most of the people I do know at this point, thought Akira, but I suppose we need to work with what we have.

Within twenty minutes, they reached one of the living walls on the perimeter of the area they'd claimed. Touka set her hand on the wall. As her eyes changed and the air filled with hair-raising static, the wall seemed to recognize that a ghoul wanted through and retracted into a portal, like something out of an alien horror movie.

"Freaky," said Kimi. "Does that just work through thigmotaxis, or maybe some sort of electromagnetic signaling?"

Touka looked back at the scientist. "I don't know for sure, but I always thought maybe it has something to do with the same signals RC gates pick up."

Now passing through more populated areas of the underground, they were occasionally greeted by the ghouls they passed.

Speaking over her shoulder, she said, "It's no Ritz, but we've got a little room prepared for the next couple of weeks. You can drop off your stuff, and we'll take you to the kitchen to explain everything."

Their group rounded another corner and nearly ran into Nishiki. His head was bowed and he was writing a list in a small notebook as he walked.

"Hey, watch where you're walking," Touka snapped.

Nishiki had stumbled back in surprise, dropping his notebook. "You walked into me, you dummy!" Grabbing his stuff off the ground, he straightened up and looked at Akira, Touka, and Kimi.

And froze, turned around, and walked away.

The women glanced at each other, confused.

A moment later, Nishiki came back around the corner. "I'm sorry, but for a second there, I thought I saw…"

Him and Kimi locked eyes. His jaw dropped.

"Hi," she said, with a weak smile.

Touka rolled her eyes. "You two have five minutes to get over yourselves, then meet us in the kitchen. We've got stuff to talk about."

"Mmmhmm," said Nishiki, sounding like he was trying to hold back tears with a hand pressed over his mouth.

It took fifteen minutes for the pair to get to the kitchen.

They both looked a bit misty-eyed, and Akira thought their clothing was a bit more mussed than when they parted, but they showed up prepared to get down to business.

She'd sent word to Kaneki that their doctor was here, and soon after he walked in with Ichika. His face lit up, like it always did, when he spotted Touka. The child quickly demanded to be held by her mother. Even after all the pain and death, Akira felt…happy for him.

The kitchen was quiet at the moment, which is why it was chosen—no humans since it was between meal times, and no ghouls since they were forbidden from eating the humans who hung out there.

Still, in the interest of hospitality, Akira grabbed a couple of snack items and leftovers that Yoriko had left out for anyone who wandered through feeling peckish. She set the food on the table and grabbed herself an apple.

Kimi settled across from her, Nishiki nearby. Touka was walking around, since Ichika wanted to play the game of pointing at random objects and having Touka name them.

Kaneki asked, "How'd they convince you to come?"

The researcher glared at Touka. "I was told that there's a half-ghoul that desperately needs medical attention."

"That was kind of a lie." Touka hoisted a giggling Ichika higher on her hip. "She wants your attention, but she doesn't need it. The truth is much more insane."

"It is," agreed Akira.

Before long, Ichika got sleepy and grew bored of her naming game. Touka handed her to her father. "If you hold her for a moment, I can make us some coffee."

"Sure," he said as he settled the baby in his arms.

Soon they were all sitting around the table, waiting on coffee or enjoying a snack as everyone's diet dictated. Kimi immediately zeroed in on Ichika, wanting to know as much as possible about half-ghouls. The discussion quickly expanded to include what little they knew about the children of the Sunlit Garden, and Eto, and what made them all different.

"I'm not an expert or anything," Touka directed at Kimi, "But if humans can survive organ transplants from us and have children with us, doesn't that mean they're not really a different species from us?"

"You aren't wrong…that's all evidence that we're a lot more similar than anyone realizes, from a biological perspective. The half-humans and the half-ghouls are probably a gold mine of data. I crossed paths with Eto a few times while Kano had us under Aogiri. He was fascinated by her, but she wasn't exactly going to let him run any tests."

"Yeah." Nishiki adjusted his glasses. "Remember how we used to have a lot of conversations about this? We don't have the resources to do any research on this, and besides, RC cells are nearly impossible to culture in vitro so we couldn't research it if we tried, but we can make some conjectures."

She nodded and picked up where he left off. "Here's what I'm thinking. Normal cells have something called the Hayflick limit. They can only divide a set number of times before they become senescent and can't divide anymore. That's partly what aging is—your cells are slowly losing the ability to regenerate themselves."

With a smile, clearly enjoying the scientific give-and-take with his long-lost girlfriend, Nishiki jumped back in. "Our high levels of RC cells, our kagunes, our regenerative abilities—that all requires a lot of cell division, but we age at the same rate as humans. So we must also have a lot of telomerase activity or something like it, like you see in iPSCs, built into us. Without that, we'd probably age super fast. As it is, our cells can divide way more than human cells without reaching the Hayflick limit any faster."

"It sounds like the half-humans from the Sunlit Garden have rapid cell division," speculated Kimi. "Maybe because of that, when they're in their prime they're faster, stronger, quicker healing. They have the fast aging that comes with it, too, but not any of the other characteristics that help balance things out. I wonder—one difference between Eto and Ichika and every other crossbreed isn't entirely genetic. It's the fact that their mothers were willing to eat an…unusual diet during their pregnancies. That suggests that at least part of the regulation needed to keep half-ghouls healthy isn't genetic, it's epigenetic. Those genes are there in every crossbreed, but they don't get expressed properly in some. They must be promoted by environmental factors in utero."

Nishiki was nodding along as she spoke, a dopey smile on his face. "You're so smart."

Ichika blew a raspberry and pointed at Nishiki.

"That is called a 'dork,' sweetie," said Touka as she cleared off the table—you could take the girl out of the café, but you couldn't take the café out of the girl. "No experimenting on my child, you two."

Kaneki looked over the table, where most everyone had finished their food and drinks. "Let's talk about the reason we're here. Akira, do you want to take the floor?"

She smiled at how decisive he sounded. Akira quickly outlined their plan and why they needed some sort of doctor.

Kimi shook her head, hair flying with the motion. "That is insane. It's unsafe, it's unethical, it's ridiculous…you're just charging in without knowing how or why it works. You have no idea what you really might be doing."

"But it does work," countered Akira. "It worked on me. It worked on Ito. You can figure out the mechanism later. For now all we need to know is, can you facilitate transportation and manage the symptoms long enough for us to have a shot?"

Kimi swallowed hard.

Akira paused and looked at the young scientist. "Come on. Aren't you curious?"

She nodded, scowling. "Yes, okay? I'm curious. Fine. I'll try. But remember that I'm not some sort of brilliant emergency doctor, so don't complain to me when it all blows up in our faces."

The former investigator grinned. "All I can ask is that you try. Thank you. Now, let's go find our disguises. I'll go over the details."

A lot of the "science" in this chapter is kind of cobbled together from stuff that gets hinted at—I tried to pull it all together in a way that makes sense, but also don't get too hung up on it because it might not stand up to too much scrutiny…

Next week: Akira goes on a girls' trip!